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When a university supercomputing center wants to reach the broadest possibile user audience for its HPC cluster - it requires a way for users from different departments, dispersed across the campus and beyond, to connect and submit large-scale computing batch jobs related to Chemistry, Business Intelligence, Biotechnology, and Life Sciences.

Before making any decision on what type of software to use as the access layer to their cluster, institutes are faced with some common issues well in advance of the implementation stage, like:

IT expertise - More often than not, users are not IT experts. They will need intuitive, instructive and efficient methods for accessing their work on the cluster.

Open source support - Open Source software is heavily endorsed and used by the scientific and research community, whatever software solution is implemented and used will need to take account of this tendency.

Access and usage - In many cases, different departments and faculties will have access to the same cluster meaning tight control and monitiring of how and when users are utilizing the resources.

NICE EnginFrame provides an intuitive access through a web-browser interface. The user-oriented interface of the EnginFrame Grid Portal means more time available to research and scientific users for productive science or research tasks. EnginFrame's ability to replace cryptic, text-oriented submission scripts with simple, menu-driven job submission & tracking allows users to submit and control analysis runs with point-and-click ease.

EnginFrame comes with important Open middleware support endorsed and used by the scientific and research community, like Globus, gLite, Unicore, etc and can be loaded with file and data management modules.

EnginFrame also comes with a series of sharing and billing components that can be harnessed across university and institute departments, to allow IT departments to maintain and track the utilization of the cluster.

Since the outset, NICE has been particularly oriented towards the Research and Academic sector and have gained enormous experience and expertise thanks to close collaborations with Research organizations worldwide that include: